Category: Reckons

[youtube width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pw-2LZT7Ys[/youtube]

This is very important info.

My second give way rules video ‘Top of the T goes before me’ is also available.

I got this handsome chap in Art Museum shop in the Mori Tower in Tokyo, you’re meant to colour them in and customise them to suit yourself, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to sully his milky perfection. One day.

Check out this gallery of customised Munnys, some of them are completely bonkers. Not many Raffys though.

Tonight I’m getting the band back together.

Since Discourse has been on hiatus I’ve moved to a standing desk (the desk here is around my navel height), I don’t know how this will affect the show, or if it will affect it at all. Maybe my voice will sound different? Maybe I’ll be more impatient?

Regardless, the show is going to be a train wreck, we’re doing it live, and once again doing it with streaming video. But I’ve set things up to be a bit more flash than last time we did that (though still not nearly as flash as the Election Show, which was ridiculously flash), with clever video switching, multiple video angles in the studio, Skype co-hosts calling in, and interacting with whatever audience is left following the break, who will be heckling us from the chat room.

It’s all very exciting, you know. I hope you can make it.

Several months ago, following the slowly building success of my weekly “underground internet radio show” (as described by NBR) I decided to produce a live online “internet TV” election show.

I’ve been live streaming our weekly show recording sessions, and have made a couple of live video shows (though in about the lowest tech way possible). I mentioned my idea to a couple of my friends & collaborators on the show, Ben Gracewood & Dylan Reeve. Dylan is an old friend, we’ve made short films together – and won an award for one of them – and he works in TV as an editor on the most popular show in the country. He has a bunch of talented friends in the industry, and with his hard work and sustained effort, we made something quite special.

It’s not just me that thinks it was special either, our viewers said things like “The Discourse election special is going off.”, and “Most entertaining, loosely-based election coverage is at discourse.co.nz.”, and “Loved the Discourse live election show. Can’t wait for the next election now!”

We had our share of technology problems, but considering the truck load of gear that arrived needing installation, configuration, and operation, all in the space of just a few hours, I think we did pretty well.

There were some problems that could have been easily resolved with a bit more testing, but testing was extremely difficult given that all the hardware only existed in one place on the day itself. So we didn’t have our on-screen graphics, diagrams, tickers, twitter box and so on for most of the show – but it all came up in the end.

If you didn’t watch the show live on election night, it is possible to watch it on justin.tv/discourse, but the recording there is sketchy, and broken up into quite awkward chunks.

Here are a few behind the scenes photos.

Dylan working on the control centre for the show, on the other side of this desk is the Mac we used to do the live hookups, Skype and so on.

This is camera 2, mounted on a big swinging jib arm, some people in the chat room didn’t like it moving around, but it was so damn cool we had a hard time listening to those people.

This is Wendy, sound recordist extraordinaire, you can see a couple of the cameras – all Sony PDW 700s, there’s one more hiding in front of her.

And here’s a big giant gallery of grabs from the stream.

The big blobs are from when I was away from my computer.

No big deal, just a rhino chair. Designed by Maximo Riera.

Can’t help thinking it’d go great with this other thing I want, from the same designer.

A new credit card arrived, plain white envelope, terms and conditions inside, but I knew what it was as I’ve been feeling all of my mail for the last month hoping for this – as, obviously, the previous one was running very close to expiration.

Once upon a time it was optional to add a PIN to your credit card (hell, once upon a time it wasn’t even possible to add a PIN to your credit card), now it’s mandatory, and it was that requirement that had ASB send me off on quite a satisfactory journey of verification, malware countermeasures, and delicious gooey multifactor goodness.

First up, of course, you have to log in to the bank website, which is all encrypted and verified by SSL. I don’t use a username or password I use on any other site.

This is the most basic of first steps, “something you know”, vis: username and password. So far so ordinary, but once you get into the card activation section things get slightly more interesting.

We get our first example of requiring a second authentication factor “something you have”, in this case the thing you have is the secret code printed on the back of the card. Possibly you could argue this is just a third example of “something you know”.

Next we have the bit I found most interesting, partly because I didn’t even notice they’d done it until I was about to hit enter. The numbers in the pad are scrambled, so malware that tracks your mouse clicks doesn’t net “the bad guys” anything useful.

Interesting that my brain translated this without even alerting me to anything suss, either it’s because I play too many computer games, so I’m used to little puzzles like this, or maybe everyone’s brain does the same thing?

Sure enough, after submission the “re-enter your code” box has a different number order.

Lastly, another factor: “something you have” again, this time my mobile phone – I couldn’t proceed without entering a randomly generated string of numbers they texted to me. I’m sure most people are used to this, it’s only in a combination with all of the other steps that I found this noteworthy.

Very satisfying, possibly this has been the way it’s worked for a couple of years, but of course I’m not in the habit of getting a lot of credit cards.

Have you noticed any other examples of really satisfyingly “good feeling” security?

I might like going serious with my shorts, but that doesn’t always stop me from including gun play, no matter how improbable.